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In this innovative approach to southern literary cultures, Thadious Davis analyzes how black southern writers use their spatial location to articulate the vexed connections between society and environment, particularly under segregation and its legacies.<
Conservative strands in American literature are often overlooked in university courses. This book focuses on the works of conservative American writers and of others who have written of America from a conservative perspective. Beginning with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, the book explores the traditionalist temper in books by Vachel Lindsay, James Agee, Flannery O'Connor, V.S. Naipaul, and Kent Haruf. Drawing on the theories of Lewis P. Simpson, Leszek Kolakowski, Roger Scruton, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, among others, this text offers a fresh examination of a significant aspect of American literature.
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Mysteries and detective stories are among the most popular of books but the writers of such genre fiction suffer from a perception that their work is to be taken less seriously than so-called literary fiction. The novels of James Lee Burke, one of the most distinguished writers of crime novels, challenge that notion, as do the 12 essays in this collection. This work examines Burke as a writer who has expanded the mystery-detective genre with an astonishing diversity of themes, imaginative language and descriptions, and unforgettable characters. He seems unbounded by limitations of genre. An interview with Burke is included.
It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of the many new works by James Agee uncovered and published in the last twenty years. These previously unknown primary works have, in turn, encouraged a parallel explosion of critical evaluation and reevaluation by scholars, to which James Agee in Context is the latest contribution. This superb collection from well-known James Agee scholars features myriad approaches and contexts for understanding the author’s fiction, poetry, journalism, and screenwriting. The essays bring the reader from the streets of James Agee’s New York to travel with the author from Alabama to Hollywood to Havana. Contributors explore overlapping and sometimes unique sub...
Fade In, Crossroads is a history of the relations between black and white southerners and films from the silent era to midcentury. It illustrates how the rise and fall of the American film industry coincided with that of the South's most important modern product and export: Jim Crow segregation.
At a time when Richard Ford was considering giving up writing fiction, suddenly he was hailed in Newsweek as "one of the best writers of his generation." Then Ford's The Sportswriter (1986), the story of suburbanite Frank Bascombe's struggle to survive loneliness and great loss, was published to great acclaim. Its sequel, Independence Day (1995), was the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. With three other novels, a well-received volume of short stories, and a trilogy of novellas to his credit, Ford was firmly established as a major literary figure. The nine essays in this volume demonstrate that Ford, like few other writers of his time, powerfully depicts what it feels like to live in the secular late-twentieth-century world, a dangerous and uncertain place where human relationships are impoverished and human existence is empty and alienated. Perspectives on Richard Ford, the first book-length examination of Richard Ford's fiction, is a reader's essential companion for studying the works of one of America's most outstanding contemporary writers.
The author uses theories on power, resistance and discipline developed by Michel Foucault to analyze the interactions of mountaineers and the authorities who have attempted to "modernize" them. The book shows how McCarthy manipulates Appalachian images while engaging in a form of archeology of Appalachian constructs. Initially the book explores the interplay of the dominance/resistance duality. Roads provided ways into the mountains for industry and ways out for the mountaineer, cotton mill villages and regional cities served as "disciplined" destinations for Appalachian out-migrants. McCarthy's character Lester Ballard (Child of God) represents the epitome of hillbilly delinquency. The author explains how the iconic image of the mountaineer--a notion cultivated by fiction writers, benevolent organizations, and academics--"othered" the mountain people as deviants. The book ends by considering the ways in which The Road returns to the rhetorical and geographical region of his early work, and how it fits into McCarthy's Appalachian oeuvre.
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.